Today's offer at Bits du Jour is Serif PhotoPlus X2 for $50 against the normal $80. It can however NOT be downloaded and tested before purchase, and I am totally not going to purchase it unless I know a lot more about it! So I was hoping some of you guys and dolls will tell what you know about & think of PhotoPlus X2, please.

Maybe I should add that I have a license for the older PhotoPlus 11, but never cared to install that version on my Vista (if it even can?). But of course I expect X2 to be a lot better.

Edited:My original question was too easy to ask and too difficult to answer. I have watched the video about X2 (on http://www.serif.com/photoplus/) and am of course impressed with the features. My question is more if you think it is easy to use, and worth the money. Does it have a context menu in Explorer? Can I easily batch resize a folder of images? Stuff like that, etc.

I do not remember details about photoplus - other than that I did like the documentation very much; certainly great for beginners. The accompanying book is very good. I believe that Paintshop Pro and PhotoLine are in the end the more powerful image editors in the same price range.

I believe PhotoPlus is not a highlight in image editing power, but very good regarding the UI and documentation. As mentioned above, I believe it is great for beginners. However, I can recommend two other Serif programs without any reservations: DrawPlus and PagePlus, both offer some outstanding features while still being very user friendly -definitely for both beginners and ambitious experienced users.

- thanks for the recommendations, Lutz_. At a total of £222 I would expect DrawPlus and PagePlus to be user-friendly, first class programs, £60 of that price being the manuals!!! Well, it is good that the company is making thorough manuals at all. And still, £222 is merely a fraction of the price for the "comparable" specialists programs from, say, Adobe CS4.

.... and if you register the old free versions of their programs (from freeserifsoftware.com ) you will very soon get email offers for very nice discounts on Serif software. If you can stand this type of marketing.

I scanned the folder, and Outpost kept saying it was malware (or spyware?, I forgot). I told about it to both Photo Pos and Agnitum, but I seriously expect nothing to happen - they have both known about this problem for several years. In your situation I *think* I would keep the attitude that the file is harmless - thanks to the answers from your google link.